Suddenly past debates about animal rights, safe spaces at universities or climate activism feel rather luxurious. The Western conundrum of great prosperity intermingled with a general pointlessness about life has been pricked.

AFL played without crowds. The virus could reverse the fraying of social bonds. AAP

While bushfires and floods more easily bring us together, the historical experience of plagues is that they create mutual suspicion and distrust. Fights over toilet paper are merely the harbinger, especially if resources become scarce in reality and not just in our minds. But at least for now, there is also the sense of mutual interdependence in combating a shared threat to the species.

The bubonic plague had a tremendous effect on the coming of the Industrial Revolution, reshaping serfdom and slavery. While Anglophiles say British culture was crucial, economist Bob Allen argued in his book Poverty and Progress in early modern Europe that higher wages in northern Europe gave stronger incentives for capital to replace labour.

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In southern Europe feudal structures were stronger. There, the higher wages from a depleted, plague-hit population were moderated by landowners re-negotiating share cropping contracts and limiting the mobility of labour.

While the Spanish flu of a century ago was worsened by the cramped density forced upon by World War 1, there is evidence that developments like Apartheid grew in momentum post-epidemic. The medical historian Frank Snowden argues in his book Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present that white scapegoating of black South Africans in 1918 began the legislative process towards Apartheid. Land was made less available to people of colour, precipitating the growth of a migrant labour system that divided black families.

A more quirky detail of the Spanish flu is that it claimed the grandfather of Donald Trump, Friedrich Trump, thus seeding an inheritance that later became the foundation of the family’s property empire.

A half century of social liberalism and its language of individual rights will be smashed by the priorities of public health.

Our current moment is also hastening some key historical trends.

One is a further blow to the primacy of the Milton Friedmanite economic model of shareholder primacy. Governments are again being forced to bail out or undergird entire industries varying from aviation to banking. Losses are being socialised as governments guarantee the wages of laid off employees. While bank CEOs are suddenly basking in a more positive glow, their loans are effectively being guaranteed by government.

While there may be strong economic arguments for all these actions, the prestige of a free-wheeling Anglo-American capitalism is surely in its death throes. Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman writes that the authoritarian model of East Asian economies will emerge with a greater prestige. If Brexit and Trump were already undermining the tenets of globalisation and multilateralism, the coronavirus threatens to slam a door in its geopolitical face. As former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt stated on Twitter: “Only the virus is globalised.”

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Another is the rush to digital. Amazon, the online everything store, has offered to hire over 100,000 laid-off workers as its business model receives a huge boost. Harvey Norman is staying alive in the retail meltdown as sales for home office equipment soar. The cohort of new digital banks are rubbing their virtual hands in glee.

Even my job, so dependent on therapeutic human connection, has shifted dramatically to a digital model. Like a Bordeaux wine connoisseur, I am becoming adept at examining through a computer screen the differences of the pink facial hues of someone’s embarrassment versus the anger of a reddish complexion. Further telehealth incentives have aided such a shift as both patients and doctors fear physical proximity.

A decade of prior government policies have failed to significantly shift such a behaviour among doctors, something the coronavirus has managed in a few weeks.

Finally, a half century of social liberalism and its language of individual rights will be smashed by the priorities of public health, which is dependent upon mutual obligation. Just as universal healthcare took off around the globe after the Spanish flu, the fraying of our social bonds, despite the physical aspect of social distancing, may ultimately be improved by a crisis that frowns upon individual autonomy.

As novelist Olivia Laing writes in The Lonely City : “The weird gift of loneliness is that it grounds us in our common humanity. However frightened we may feel, we have never been less alone.”

A key contributor to the demand in my services is the dilution of human connection and a fraying of the inner life, two yearnings that are now absolutely front of mind.

More than 10,000 people poured into the nation's capital on the ninth day of protests over police brutality, but what awaited them was a city that no longer felt as if it was being occupied by its own country's military.